


La Danza Macabra

by secretagentsmutgirl



Category: Casino Royale (2006), James Bond (Movies), James Bond - All Media Types, Quantum of Solace (2008), Skyfall (2012) - Fandom
Genre: Angst, Death, F/M, Luck and Fate, Reflection, angsty angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-20
Updated: 2012-12-20
Packaged: 2017-11-21 19:34:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,110
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/601323
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/secretagentsmutgirl/pseuds/secretagentsmutgirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>James Bond had never been a sentimental man, in fact he was more than casually cruel and careless to a fault, but he could admit now that she had died with water in her throat and his heart in her fist.</p>
            </blockquote>





	La Danza Macabra

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fivespice](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fivespice/gifts).



> Author’s Note: Hello Yuletide Recipient! This challenge has been a labor because I love James too well, and allow him to be his own worst critic and wallow in the angst. I predominantly exist in the book-verse for this fandom but I adore the banter and the tension between James and Vesper in the film. She is truly his foil- she ruins him for all other women and sets him on this cyclical destructive path. I've set this reflective angst-fest through the first few scenes of Skyfall. 
> 
> Hopefully you've seen the film, only a tiny spoiler really, and hopefully you enjoy this.

**La Danza Macabra**

“I have no armor left. You've stripped it from me. Whatever is left of me - whatever is left of me - whatever I am - I'm yours.” – _Casino Royale_

 

It had been two weeks since the Russia desk had sent out the cipher to M16 headquarters. Money movements in Ankara had been flagged in association with known guns for hire with links to petty crimes in Asia Minor as well as previously undertaken operation for the terrorist group known as Quantum on the same day that a hard drive containing the names of undercover agents planted in terrorist groups internationally.

From there it was ten days since the eyes only had been given to M for review and evaluation; she had ordered operations to move up the time frame for assignment. For two days the order had lingered in committee for resources and budgetary muckraking. One day to authorize a fixer and garner orders, half a day to check armaments and read the already outdated dossier on the mission.

Q Branch had been particularly chaotic, leaving the interim Quartermaster a shade above snarky in his advice and summation of proper use of materials and barely the time to thrust a brand new Walther PPK into his hands with instructions not to waste ammunition. Only time would tell if proprietary understanding of previously issued service materials would serve, or if the instructions should have been heeded.  Since the cipher had been sent out, Moscow had mobilized operations just south of Krasnodar, waiting for unreliable intelligence to come to fruition with their fingers on the trigger. Currently Bond was two hours outside of Yalta with orders to kill.

It was a Tuesday in November; ten hours shy of the anniversary of his license to kill.

There was no dread or adrenaline associated with the mission, no fear or elation or zeal for Queen and country. It had been years since he had felt anything other than fleeting pleasures, those found in the arms of beautiful women and good vodka. The endgame of the Le Chiffre operation in Montenegro had made him a bloodless thing, but in truth he hadn’t truly gone cold until that morning in Venice. He had never been a sentimental man, in fact he was more than casually cruel and careless to a fault, but he could admit now that she had died with water in her throat and his heart in _her_ fist.

Like all assignments the trail goes cold almost immediately, leaving only breadcrumbs to trace the target from Ankara into the heart of Istanbul, and things go from simple to complicated the moment M assigns him a tail as though he hasn’t taken care of his own business since he’d been too young to realize there was a fine line between prepared to survive and ruthless.

While he struggles to subdue the mercenary, scrambling for purchase on the roof of the train, all he can hear is the wind and there is blood in his mouth. Before he hears the shot, before the impact throws him from the moving train and into the unbroken waters down below he considers how long it has truly been since he’d felt anything but physical pain.

His backup takes the shot from the ridge above and the bullet tears itself through the muscle and sinew of his shoulder, dragging him along on its path predestined by gravitational forces. When the impact of the water tension snaps through him and the cold water rushes into his mouth, he has one absurd flash of conscious thought before he lost himself to the depth.

 _At least,_ he thought pithily even in his thoughts, _I didn’t have a heart to get in the way of the bullet._

**00**

The day that started his slow descent into death had started routinely enough; with orders to infiltrate a high stakes game of chance in order to take down the big money behind the movement of money and munitions to known terrorist rings in the global south. His doom, like those of most men, was inextricably linked to a woman.

They had met, of all things cliché and trite, as strangers on a train.

The woman in question took the seat across from him in the dining car as though they were intimately acquainted instead of distantly on the same payroll, as if he had been expecting her and had guilelessly regarded him with a frankness that was unusual for a woman. Her greeting snapped as severely as her clipped upper-class enunciation, the overt sexuality of her smile belied by the buttoned up cut of her attire: “I’m the money”.

Her voice was rich, dark and husky and the effect on him was akin to the good whisky poured over ice- it crackled and burned.  Her dark eyes danced devilishly, waiting for him to return to the game and pursue her opening parry. Charmed he was compelled to charm in turn, even if she was an unwanted interruption and an unnecessary accessory to a starkly straightforward job. If M thought he ought to have her, perhaps he ought to follow her orders to the letter. He could resist anything but a challenge.

He smiled all careless allure and careful self-depreciation, knowing that if it gave a thrill or insult the adrenaline would be the same: “Every penny.”

 It was a game, no question, but the stakes were still under debate. She looked at him, into him really, in a way that no one had ever done before; straight through the polished veneer designed to make people look through him. Dark eyes had stripped away custom tailoring, studied nonchalance, Omega watches and the affection of mid-century wine until he stood exposed.

 It was an interesting sensation, something that would have prompted introspection if there hadn’t been such a hard edge to her banter. It was like peering through the looking glass, a shocking role reversal regardless of gender. Figuratively, he felt stripped naked on a crowded train.

Vesper Lynd had so much to prove and such a vicious disregard for the damage and devastation she would cause in her wake.  He admired her then for her nerve, for the cruelty it fostered and in the space of their brief meeting he had set his sights on bringing her down to his level, to make her feel as unprotected as he felt in that moment.

 No matter what means necessary.

**00**

Objectively he could cede that she scored the first point in the game on the first night of the card game, as his blatant disregard for their cover and his open doubt over validity of her presence on the mission had done nothing more but turn her behavior more haughty and disdainful.

  James Bond had learned two things early in his young life, before climbing accidents and eyes only dossiers changed the thread of his fate into something much harder and much colder than his lineage would have had in mind. First that money can buy anything and solve anything given the right amount of time and influence, and second that everyone will leave you in the end. It isn’t cynicism when empirical evidence has proven these facts to be irrevocably true. The true pleasures in life were fleeting, mere moments and glances in the long slow drag of years.

Training required that he keep well aware of all exits and means of egress, that he watches who came and went should trouble arise as it invariably would. When Vesper entered the room in that dress stunningly confident and cavalier, he had the pleasure of watching the assembled bankrolled socialite rats and thugs watch her walk into the room with eyes clearly for him.

Wrapping an arm around him, she pressed her lips against his cheek. She smelled like citrus and something rich like clove or amber and hadn’t done as he’d asked. “Weren’t you supposed to enter so the others could see you? 

“Was I?” Her lips quirked and her expression not at all regretful, “Forgive me.”

She preened, letting the room see her and he silently applauded her instincts to torment, it served both their ends. Smiling tight lipped down at him, she drawled, “Good luck, darling” before joining Mathis at the bar.

All eyes were on her then, even his. He wasn’t much for keepsakes or mementos; sentiment wasn’t for his line of work or lifestyle. _This_ , however, this he was prepared to keep.

**00**

 In the aftermath, after the job was done and there was blood staining both their hands, after she had saved him at the expense of her composure and cool, he understood it had never really been a game between them. They were too much, their personalities too strong and their passions too controlled and to careless in equal measure. It wasn’t purely physical, it was physics and they were bodies in motion as well as equal and opposite.

When he held her, her body wracked with sobs and eyes wild and unseeing like a lion cornered and threatened he had felt equally as wild.  He hadn’t felt the cold of the water pooling in the shower and saturating her clothes, he hadn’t felt anything for himself but instead he counted the beats of her heart in her pulse and willed the heat in his blood to revive the fierce creature that elicited a slew of sundry emotions- including that ancient, visceral instinct to protect.

To protect what was his, and in that moment she was his.

So his love came to fruition with water, and so would his world end over and over. Watching those wild eyes again through a wall of water, watching them so full of shame, full of love and then they were gone- her eyes were empty and her heart was still. She chose her fate in the end- she chose him even if it took him years to realize that he had loved her too well, that if he hadn’t she would still live.

When he hit the water in Istanbul he thought that he had in that moment made his choice, thought that he had finally found his end and escaped.

Death would be to easy a way out for him and in the end he returned to the only thing he knew.

**00**

Battered and broken James stood before M, exposed before the scrutiny of her uncanny grey eyes. After a long moment, a weighted look and, he imagined a cost-benefit analysis of the situation, she asked, “Where the hell have you been?”

He couldn’t stop the wry half smile that her ire always elicited. “Enjoying death. 007 reporting for duty.” M put down her jacket, turned on the office light and then it was business as usual.

So the cycle would begin again; the dance of the dead.

Officially his death certificate stated that he has been dead for ten months, eleven days and sixteen hours but he knows the score. In truth MI6 administered the poison that would kill him themselves. He’d been dying since he pulled the trigger in Minsk to satisfy his second kill order. It was a slow death, a mercy killing aided by his ego of all things and soothed by the wrong things as usual. He would become their weapon once again and resume the search for the classified hard-drive that meant life or death to hundreds of undercover agents.

There was nothing outside of the double-0, the kill or be killed, the weight of gunmetal in is hand. The world was not meant for people like him; now he knew his place. He had tried living in those months he had been classified as dead and his number retired, tried to live the life he had promised _her_ in those halcyon days before he knew her betrayal. Those days before he had hated her, those days before he had learned that she had been betrayed herself by Yusef’s false love and the machinations of Quantum. Before he had accepted that, in the end, she had done right for him and by him- that she had loved him unselfishly and had died vindicated.

Living, being a living creature with a heart and a soul was not in the cards for him.

 _She_ \- Vesper had won the game in the end; death was the final checkmate. What good was living without her?  Unfortunately resurrection was more than a hobby, it was his life work. Even now his heart felt still in his chest, as though unwilling to let anyone else stop its beat if it could not be her.

One day, perhaps the death might take.


End file.
